'Benign' Brain Events May Signal Stroke

Dec. 27, 2007 -- Brief episodes of confusion, amnesia, or fainting with no easily explainable medical cause may signal an increased risk for stroke and dementia among older people, new research suggests.

Doctors often dismiss such episodes as benign occurrences, but researchers found that they were associated with a more than 50% higher risk of stroke and dementia among people age 55 and over.

"Our findings challenge the strong but unfounded conviction that [these events] are harmless," Michiel J. Bos, MD, and colleagues from the Netherlands' Erasmus Medical Center write in the Dec. 26 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Assessing Stroke Risk

Patients who have small "mini-strokes" -- with symptoms typically lasting only a few minutes -- are at increased risk for more severe strokes with serious medical consequences.

Known medically as transient ischemic attack (TIA), studies suggest that about one in 10 patients who have these transient mini-strokes will suffer a major stroke within 90 days of the event.

But diagnosing a TIA is difficult precisely because symptoms often resolve very quickly.

In the latest study, Bos and colleagues considered the role of a broader range of neurological events in major stroke risk.

These transient neurological attacks (TNAs), as the researchers termed them, were defined as events involving neurological symptoms typically lasting only a few minutes or hours and no more than 24 hours.